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READ: Moments of Expectation

The last time I actively tried to update this blog I ended a
race with a dislocated kneecap. I did not continue to post here because I’ve
not had a great amount of interaction off this place. Which is to say, it’s
been a one-way street of communication without the feeling of a callback.

It is amusing to me, thinking about that, and knowing that I
titled the blog Postcards from Here. Postcards are naturally one-way
communications that can’t be responded to. I don’t know why I let that hold me
back from trying to communicate, but I think in a lot of ways I expected the
embarrassment of trying with no audience to outweigh the usefulness of this
space. But, because I’ve never tried I don’t know whether or not that is true.

On my longer tours, always 50 to 60 days in I reach a moment
where I have an epiphany that is a continuous and lifelong epiphany and seems
very obvious when it arises. Over the last month I’ve been in Alabama writing
with limited internet access. Perhaps that allowed the epiphany to occur, or
perhaps it was the content I was writing: the bicycle tour in extended-form
that allowed it to re-occur.

Regardless why, it returned. Every day on a bicycle feels
the most important because you wake with an objective, you work hard the entire
day toward your objective, and you fall asleep with the completion of that
objective in the distance x days away (x being somewhere between 1 and 90 or y).
The monotony of a grind in real life overwhelms this distinct sensation of
productivity. It doesn’t have to though, if daily life was full of immediate,
short-term objectives then it would occupy the sensational space of traveling.
What is special about traveling is the end that starts the second of the
beginning, and until the end everything is important because it leads to a
sense of getting the most out of it.

I intend to try, or put more effort into trying to make this
epiphany a reality. I know the sensation of feeling every day. Feeling every
day distinctly. When I return to life from a tour I can never distinguish life
from a video game because the games I like include unwinnable grinds. I’ve
equated life to an unwinnable grind that offers incremental improvements. It’s
more about the experience though. I aim to focus on that and return myself to a
daily sensation of improvement.

I will agree with what I had left here: Love can change the
world. We should love more people and we should tell them every day that we
love them. We should not feel guilty for feeling guilty.

I don’t know if I really ever did want to regularly document
my life. To regularly share. I’ve never done that and because I’ve hidden a lot
of my life consistently, the idea of sharing intimate things of the mundane
that I hold special seems really far away from something that I am comfortable
with. I think above all I fell short of my hopes of sharing because I don’t
share. I’m not naturally open. The postcard is proof of that. To share is to
receive and I’ve only ever wanted to give and then run away hoping what I gave
was good and useful.

Blogging may be a way I can increase the variations of how I
treat accountability and work through it. So I’ll continue to blog, for myself,
in the mode of postcards. Maybe these will offer something occasionally. If
not, I’ll be happy to have done them and used it as an exercise to exercise
epiphanies. I will try to hold myself more accountable and I will try to submit
works more frequently so that I can share in more ways than this.